1. Field of the Invention
The present invention concerns creation of printer instances in a printers folder on a workstation. More particularly, the present invention concerns creating a printer instance in the printers folder of a workstation for peer-to-peer communication over a local network between the workstation and the printer by accessing a website listing of printers that can be added to the printers folder of the workstation and selecting a printer from the website listing, whereby in response to the selection, identification information of the selected printer and command information is transmitted via the Internet to the workstation such that printer configuration information and print driver information of the printer are automatically obtained and installed on the workstation and the instance of the printer is created in the printers folder.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, printer instances are created in a windows operating system by a user performing operations at the workstation. For instance, U.S. Pat. No. 5,692,111 to Marbry et al. (hereinafter referred to as the “'111 patent”) describes a process in which a user adds a new server based printer of a local network in the windows registry of their workstation by browsing the local network and selecting the server based printer that he/she wants to add. Upon selecting the server based printer, printer configuration files and print driver files for the selected printer are retrieved from the network bindery and are installed on the user's workstation, after which an instance of the server based printer is created in the user's windows registry. This process works well for installing printers that are part of, for example, a local area network serviced by a print server where the user is connected to the local area network. However, this technique requires that the user's workstation have network client software installed on the workstation and that the user be logged-in to the network before the user is able to install the printer. As a result, if the user's workstation does not have the necessary network client software installed, or the user is unable to log-in to the network, for example, due to a lack of administrative rights, the user is unable to install and/or print to the printer. Another problem with the '111 patent is that, because the printer is part of a server based printing system, the printer is required to be set-up on the print server before a user is able to install the printer on their workstation and submit a print job to the printer. Accordingly, what is needed is an easier way for a user to install a printer on a workstation.